Prior to digital cameras and digital photographs (or photos), a person typically displayed her photo collection to others in a photo album, a slideshow, or simply passed a stack of photos to others for review. Digital cameras have allowed users to take and store a voluminous amount of personal digital photos. Furthermore, digital photos may be displayed individually on a computer screen, or in a digital frame, within a “digital slideshow.”
A person may share her digital photo collections by uploading her images to a webservice (e.g., FLICKR®) and sharing this uploaded collection with others. Users, however, are limited to viewing these pictures individually, or as a collection of “thumbnails”—i.e., reduced sized versions of the photos to allow the simultaneous display of one or more images on a display device.
Individual or thumbnail display of digital photographs, however, gives a viewer a very limited sense of what the person who took the photographs experienced when the images were captured.
Digital video data may be uploaded and shared in a similar limited manner. Additionally, a collection digital video data is often summarized as collections of thumbnails, wherein a thumbnail represents an individual frame of each digital video in a collection. In addition to the limitations described above, thumbnail summarization does not convey enough information to a viewer about the contents a digital video collection.
Descriptions of certain details and implementations follow, including a description of the figures, which may depict some or all of the embodiments described below, as well as discussing other potential embodiments or implementations of the inventive concepts presented herein. An overview of embodiments of the invention is provided below, followed by a more detailed description with reference to the drawings.